Why Isn’t My Job Posting Showing Up On Indeed?

The Real Reasons Your Job Posting on Indeed Isn’t Showing Up

“Why aren’t my jobs showing up on Indeed?” This is one of the most common questions that we receive at Newton about third-party job boards like Indeed. In fact, this issue is so prevalent that Michael Dobbs from our services team suggested that we write an article about it and so we did. Thanks for the help Michael!

Michael Dobbs, Implementation Manager at Newton Software

With Job Postings, First, Be Patient

When you first post a job to Indeed’s organic feed (or that of any other employment site), keep in mind that there is a delay. New jobs and updates will not appear on the job boards immediately. There is an unavoidable delay based on how often those job boards refresh their data.

Job Posting Delay Time Estimates

CareerBuilder: 15 minutes LinkedIn: 12 hours

Glassdoor: Up to 24 hours Indeed: 6 hours

Monster: 2 hours

Why Your Job Isn’t Showing Up In the Organic Feed

If you find yourself waiting beyond the time frames listed above and your job still hasn’t appeared, this may be a sign that your job has been flagged as “spam” and blacklisted from the jobs feed.

Why Would My Job Be Listed as Spam?

The value of employment sites and job boards is derived directly from the quality of jobs that they provide job seekers. For this reason, job sites like Indeed place search quality (creating the best search experience for job seekers) as their number one priority.

To protect search quality, employment sites have entire teams that monitor job postings and utilize advanced algorithms to identify, flag, and weed out any jobs that are spammy, misleading, or predatory. For the most part, these safeguards work in the way that they are intended and do a great service for the job seeker. Sometimes, however, legitimate jobs can end up being flagged as spam.

Insider Tip: Want to keep your jobs from being blacklisted? Review the 5 factors below that may cause your jobs to be flagged as spam.

Top 5 Reasons Your Job Posting Will Get Flagged as Spam

1. Job Type

With organic listings, part-time and temporary jobs are often flagged as spam. Whether you have “part-time” present in the title or “part-time/temporary” written down in the body of the job description, Indeed’s algorithms and search quality team may flag your job posting and suppress it from the organic job feed.

2. Job Titles

Be direct in your job titles and write them exactly as a job seeker would search for them. Stay away from terms like “Brand Ambassador” or “Coding Ninja,” as these will likely trigger spam filters. Also, refrain from using generic terms like shift 1, shift 2, and so forth because these will also be flagged.

3. Job Posting Frequency

Frequently posting the same job on Indeed to keep it high in search results is a major trigger for spam filters. Don’t try to cheat the system, as this will only guarantee that your job posting is excluded from the results altogether.

This is important to note for evergreen positions that are always open such as nurses, gas station attendants, and so on. These jobs are generally not available for organic visibility and you should strongly consider sponsoring evergreen positions.

Insider Tip: If you are a Newton applicant tracking system customer, we can get you directly set up with Indeed job sponsoring here.

4. Job Location

Another activity that gets immediately flagged as spam is “location blasting.” This is when employers post an identical job to multiple locations hoping to draw in more applicants. For example, posting the same call service representative job to 10 cities all within the state of Florida is location blasting. A general rule of thumb is that jobs should only be posted for locations where there is actually a physical presence.

Insider Tip: vague locations such as “America” or “national” are likely to be flagged as spam also.

5. Job Salary

Commission only jobs are generally not available for organic visibility. As such, do not include “commission only” in the job title or the job description. All of your jobs should have either hourly or salary wages clearly defined in your job posting.

Insider Tip: Internships can’t be posted as free. You must specify pay or credits earned.

Related Articles

Welcome back to our series on exactly what recruiters want and need in recruiting software. In our last post, we explored several themes that really make an ATS valuable for busy recruiters. In this post, we continue with more key features and benefits of an ATS that...

Recruiting is one of the most demanding roles available in today’s fast-paced job market. So many industries have a major need for talented candidates. This means recruiters must work overtime to connect quality candidates with their dream jobs. There are many...

We’re back for Part 2, sharing our top 10 strategies for gaining an edge in today’s battleground for the best talent. Check out part 1 here. In our last post, we covered how recruiting software can strengthen your employer brand by improving the candidate experience...